Tony Leike as a fugitive

Tony Leike’s fugitive status is not simply an absence from the police’s reach: it is a condition he actively stages, using a severed finger, another man’s identity, and the investigators’ assumptions to make his disappearance look like a death. The trail repeatedly appears to close, only to reopen as Harry Hole recognizes that the evidence may have been arranged to send him in the wrong direction.

A Disappearance Constructed as an Ending

The first apparent endpoint is a severed finger. Leike has cut it off and sent it to Harry as what seems to be a final diversion, meant to remove any doubt that he is dead and allow the case to be closed. The gesture is especially pointed because Harry is missing the same finger; he wonders whether Leike chose it to imitate him. Yet the supposed confirmation does not settle the matter. Harry keeps returning to Leike’s seemingly airtight alibi and asks whether the explanation is really so simple, or whether Leike has an accomplice.

The false ending becomes more concrete when Harry receives confirmation from the tower at Gardermoen that Odd Utmo flew to Copenhagen the previous day on a ticket booked shortly beforehand. Harry imagines the routine passport check: an official compares the name on the document with the name on the ticket, while the traveler’s unusual dental clip might pass without scrutiny. The passport belongs to a man Harry had tortured and killed; Tony Leike had bent the clip to fit his own large teeth. The detail turns an ordinary identity check into the mechanism of the escape: the record appears to say that Odd Utmo travelled, even as Harry suspects that Leike has used the dead man’s identity.

Three days later, Leike is still missing, and the trail of the false Odd Utmo ends in Copenhagen. The press nevertheless presents the case as nearly resolved. Mikael Bellman describes Leike as exposed and neutralized, treating the fact that the murderer has not been caught as a minor matter. That public version converts an unresolved pursuit into a finished story, while the silence about Leike’s whereabouts leaves the essential question open.

The Trail Shifts to Congo

The Copenhagen trail does not resolve the question of where Tony Leike has gone. Harry Hole’s suspicion that Leike has used Odd Utmo’s identity gains another possible route when he connects a missing passport to Juliana Verni, a woman from Leipzig whose distinctive red hair also appears in reports about Lene Galtung. The police never found Verni’s passport. Harry believes Leike took it, and then passed it to Lene; he asks whether it bears a Kigali stamp, but the stamp is a point to investigate, not a confirmed fact. The passport’s disappearance turns identity into a movable disguise, just as the false Odd Utmo trail had made a dead man appear to travel.

A booking in Zürich gives the pursuit a direction. A woman with red hair has reserved a flight to Görna City in Congo under Verni’s name, although Verni is dead. Harry warns that she may be arrested if officials discover she is travelling on the passport of someone who died two months earlier. But that risk does not make the lead secure: the international record may take up to a year to remove a dead person’s passport number, and Norway has no police-cooperation agreement with Congo. Harry therefore argues against waiting for an arrest and says Lene Galtung can lead them to Leike. Kaja Solness has also uncovered a more immediate connection: Lene emptied an account in Zürich a few days earlier, withdrawing two million euros. It is not enough to finance Leike’s mining project, Harry reasons, but it could keep the project alive through a difficult period.

In Görna City, Leike’s evasion becomes a reversal of the pursuit. Travelling with Harry Hole and Kaja Solness, he tells them he has been watching them since they arrived. He points to the city’s limited resources and small power structure, and treats their decision to come alone as a miscalculation. His disclosure makes clear that the investigators have not simply followed a trail to his refuge: they have entered a place where Leike has already been observing them, and where he can exploit the weakness of local institutions.

Leike also supplies a rationale for the world in which he operates. He presents the mine as a source of roads and economic development, while describing violence as part of an unalterable cycle of survival. His account casts him as a practical entrepreneur confronting an unavoidable reality, even as his own escape depends on deception, assumed identities, and the vulnerability of others. The contrast sharpens the fugitive status: Leike is not merely hiding from the consequences of his crimes but continuing to shape the story around them, while Harry and Kaja try to distinguish his claims from the conditions he has engineered.

Surveillance and the Threat of a Counter-Story

Leike’s account of the houses near Lake Kivu turns their architecture into a lesson in escape: built with a door at the front and another at the back, they let occupants flee while intruders enter. He uses that pattern to explain how he got out of the house without Kaja Solness noticing. Then he reverses the roles outright, revealing that he has been watching Harry Hole and Kaja since they entered the country and calling their decision to come alone naïve. The fugitive is no longer merely evading observation; he claims to have been directing it.

When Kaja asks what would happen if two Norwegian police officers disappeared in Görna City, Leike offers a ready-made explanation: disappearances are common there, and the police could receive a ransom demand from a rebel group. His answer exposes another part of his refuge. He can imagine turning the investigators’ absence into a story that implicates someone else, exploiting the place’s instability to conceal what has happened to them. His escape thus rests not only on false identities and misleading trails, but on the ability to make a disappearance seem locally plausible.

The Evidence Behind the Flight

The route to Tony Leike runs through a case that first looked like an isolated killing. Borgny Stem-Myhre left the Mono after an evening event, telling a friend that she was going home to prepare for a photo shoot. No taxi driver identified her, and no one saw her again before two bricklayers found her body in a basement. The forensic estimate placed her death between ten and eleven that night. Ketanomin had been found in her blood, but she had died by drowning in blood from wounds inside her mouth: investigators counted twenty-four evenly spaced punctures, each exactly seven centimetres deep except those that had pierced her face. The clean concrete floor yielded no fingerprints, DNA, or footwear impressions. Two small grey-black stones on it did not match the site’s gravel, and traces of iron and coltan were later found on the inside of two of her molars.

A missing-person report and a travel record began to join the cases. Adele Vetlesen, twenty-eight and from Drammen, had been reported missing by her partner in November. On 7 November she had bought a train ticket from Drammen to Ustaoset; on the same date Borgny Stem-Myhre had bought a ticket to the same mountain region from Kongsberg. The overlap mattered because Ustaoset lay close to the Hävasshütte, one of the huts on a route for which Iska Peller’s account had paid for two beds at each of four huts, roughly a day’s walk apart. The last hut on that booking was the Hävasshütte, only half a day’s walk from Ustaoset.

Elias Skog’s recollection gave the shared location a more disturbing meaning. He had seen a man holding a woman’s mouth and pulling her into the outhouse, but at the time he mistook her movements for a sexual performance and went back to sleep. After reading about the murders, he reconsidered what he had witnessed: she may have been struggling to get free, while the hand over her mouth prevented her from calling for help. The apparent assault became part of the investigation’s effort to reconstruct what happened at the hut, not a settled explanation of it. When Harry Hole later learned that Tony Leike had been identified as the man with Adele Vetlesen, the expected account still failed to fit; Harry realized that it had not been a rape, and that this correction itself was the motive. The fugitive trail therefore emerges from a chain of mistaken appearances: an unseen departure, a shared destination, a witness’s misreading, and evidence whose significance changes as the cases are connected.